Sunday, 10 February 2013

From real food to processed horse lasagne

Last
night, as near-freezing rain continued to fall outside, we hit catch-up TV and
the second episode of Monty Don’s French Gardens.

This
was the episode looking at kitchen gardens – or potagers, as our Gallic friends
would say.

In fact, since my little bit of stolen space fits neither the usual
understanding of a ‘garden’ or an ‘allotment’, I may just adopt this term to
describe it.

Indeed,
having realised that the tatty old spade I possessed was woefully inadequate
for the job of digging in compost and manure, I wandered down to Columbia Road
this morning and bought a new, considerably better one. Tools do make a difference.

As
I was paying, the man in the shop asked: ‘Have you got an allotment or a
garden?”

Being
a tad on the pedantic side, I had to say that I would call it neither – which
then, of course, demanded a lengthier explanation.

Later,
christening that spade by digging trenches in the grey drizzle – god, I was
determined to get outside and do something – I found myself deciding that that
French words best fits my little patch.

And
it is a patch, I admit, that is sneakily growing. After all, when the boughs of
a tree are so low that only a rather small dwarf could stand up under them,
there’s no point putting communal decking there, now is there? Which means it must be part of my growing space instead.

The
digging-in is going in mixed fashion. Roots and stones are the main things that
hamper more rapid progress, although the soil itself – before it has anything dug into it – is
incredibly dense. It’s not difficult to dig, but the minute I walk on it in
this weather, it is clumping heavily.

Still,
we made some more progress, even if not a great deal. And now that the evenings
are lightening, I can do a few minutes after work in the next fortnight.

I’ve
decided not to sow anything yet – even in the growhouse – because it’s still so
cold.

Hopefully,
by next weekend, matters will have changed and we’ll be beginning a genuine
upswing in temperatures toward spring.

But
let’s go back to Monty Don. The programme was a joy.

Just one of things that
struck me with force, was the idea that vast numbers of French people try to
grow at least something for the kitchen.

And
this in a country where, as he pointed out, one in three people still shop
regularly at markets, and one in two shop regularly with a sense of the
seasonal and the regional.

Try
and take those figures in. They're worlds away from the situation in the UK at the
moment.

Don
explained the concepts of terroir – an idea that I love – aswell as what a
paysan
means. Just think, we use 'peasant' as a derogatory term.

Yet what we discovered in his explorations of both of these terms were the ideas of a sense of region and soil and climate, and of people who grow for themselves to live off the land.

I’m
sure I’m not moving toward some form of Ludditism, because I certainly have no
objection to technology or science per se – not remotely – but there are times
when I look at programmes like that, and recall also what we’ve seen ourselves
in the south of France, and I do really long for something simpler.

And
yet here we are, instead, with stories of horsemeat lasagne from Findus.

At this point, it
no longer really matters what company is hitting the headlines.

The
key point is that big businesses are trying to increase profits at the same
time as driving down the prices on the shelves, and apparently without
realising that their suppliers/producers also need to make a profit too – or at
least break even – or caring.

And
in all this, nobody seems to give a damn for what the customer might actually
end up eating.

So then you get things like this, from the responses to an Observer editorial today, in
direct reply to a point about us (the UK) actually growing our own food:

“…
we’d be vastly worse off, in a way that would disproportionately affect the
poorest in society by forcing them to buy expensively produced domestic goods,
while also diverting people from more value-generating activities back onto the
land (which would be the opposite of the history of human progress).”

Someone
find me a wall to beat my head against.

It’s
actually pretty much at the heart of what is wrong – how can you regard food
and food security etc as not having enough value?

Where
do we begin to look at the wrongness of those sentiments?

Well,
I’m not going to do it right now. But what I am going to post is something a
little different.

Here
are the ingredients lists for six supermarket-branded, ready-made lasagnas from
three supermarkets. Each pair includes a premium one and an ‘economy’ version,
plus prices/weights per product.

Setting aside the over-complexity of a dish that we all know needs nowhere near as many individual ingredients, did you notice that the cheapest product is the one that claims to have the highest
percentage of beef in it?

And that the most expensive product is the one that
claims to have the smallest percentage of beef in it?

And similarly, that the most expensive is the one with the least individual ingredients in it.

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About Me

London-based journalist, writer, photographer and artist, with one Other Half and three cats.
This blog is about all sorts of things, but mostly reviews. My interests include comics and opera (and even comic opera), cats, tattoos and art.
100% personal. Non-PC. No 'party line'.
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